 I'm gonna do some flashcards. Wait, I have how many cards to do? Hey friends, today we are talking finally about flashcards, not just any flashcards, the best tools, specifically comparing both Anki and Quizlet and talking about which is the best for helping you study for wherever you are on your journey. And in this video, we are gonna do a full breakdown of both tools, both Anki and Quizlet, and talk to you about the pros, the cons, the costs, as well as things that you didn't even know you needed to know, but are gonna be helpful to help me make the decision of which resource you should be using to help you learn better. And if at any point in the video, if there's a specific part that you're interested in, I'll break down all the chapters of the things that we'll discuss in the video, as well as the timestamps right here, but let's get into it. So first we're gonna go ahead and break down Anki and specifically what it is, how to use it, and how it's different than Quizlet. Now Anki is a free resource that is responsible for how well I did in medical school, but also responsible how well this channel is done because the most popular video that we have here on the journey, specifically how to use Anki with advanced techniques that I use in medical school. So if you guys are interested, make sure you go to that video after this one. I will link that down below. Make sure you go to it. And in case you're brand new to Anki, that video will definitely help you out because we go through all the basics and advanced stuff. Essentially think of Anki as like a nice smart flashcard tool. Not only can you make flashcards if I go in here and I wanted to make a basic flashcard, I could easily say from what is the capital of Texas and because I'm from Austin, boom, smiley face. So making a flashcard is that simple. Now it doesn't look as pretty which we'll get into in the pros and cons of it. But essentially when I create a flashcard like that, now if I wanted to just study whatever I just made, I can just go into an individual deck where the card was and click study now. Now this is the part that makes Anki cool is that not only will it ask you the question that you made and you can see the answer, but it uses space repetition, which is very important for learning. Essentially it means that if I suck at something, which is going to be pretty much everything you try to learn for the first time, you want to see it more frequently. But once you start mastering a topic, like capital of Texas is something that I've learned for my entire lifetime, it's not something I need multiple repetitions for. So if you have a new topic, you can tell Anki, show this flashcard to me in one minute. Or if it's something that's really easy, then it can tell you an extended amount of time until you see that flashcard again. This way if you're learning a language, if you're in medical school like I was, or if you're really in any class, you can see the information that you suck at more often, things that you've kind of mastered over time, you can see it less frequently. So then again, your learning is focused on those weak points. And this is really the biggest sell of Anki is that you can use space repetition to create all of your flashcards if I'm doing cardiology one day and I want to go in, study a deck for a musculoskeletal or a biochem, I can do those. And it'll start to show me the cards that I'm weakest at first because that's how the algorithm is built in. Now the second benefit of Anki is that it's absolutely free with one caveat. Essentially it's an open source software. That means it's given for free, people are adding flashcards, but they're also adding add-ons. So if you want cool tools that make things look like this, like how frequently you've done your flashcards, which for me as a physician now, not so much. Or if you want to change your settings, you can add other add-ons that have timers and make Anki look a little bit prettier than it normally does. It's open source. That means people are contributing to the community to make Anki a better resource. There's always constant updates that makes your experience a little bit better. In addition, because it's open source, you can essentially find decks that other people have made and download those, upload those to your own personal Anki drive. So for example, if you are in biochemistry, maybe you want to find an Anki deck for biochemistry. You can simply type it in and then usually what I'll look for is something that says Anki Web Biochemistry. So if you're using the Kaplan book or if you're using that as a resource, it will actually show you the Anki web there. This one has 800 flashcards and I can download it and then upload it into my software. So for example, I have tons of popular pre-made cards that other people have put their time and effort doing. So for example, the Anki deck is one of the most popular for medical school students and I can essentially pick a class that I'm studying for. So maybe I'm in my GI block and I can just start doing flashcards that other people have made from high yield resources without having to feel like I have to make them my own if I really just want to study biochem. And just to show you some examples of the type of flashcards that Anki allows you to make, it's more than just having a friend to the backup card. For example, I can have an answer choice that actually shows me multiple things. I can even have links within my answer choice. So if I wanted to click here, it actually take me to a video that explains this answer choice. You can also have images in your answer sections of you're taking annotations on a slide. You can screenshot those for the questions that it's relevant for. In addition, you can make flashcards where you can essentially do a two for one. So maybe I want to have a flashcard that quizzes me on this part and then another flashcard that quizzes me on another. But at the same time, later in my study session, I will have a flashcard that will only quiz me on this and reveal the other one. There's actually many more benefits and types of flashcards you can make and I break those all down in that intro Anki video, which again, I'll link down below. My last benefit that's actually very huge is that you own your cards because this is actually on my main desktop and can follow with me to my iPad, my phone. No one owns these cards. And so if Anki for some reason decided to shut down, if their website crashed, I would still have access to my flashcards, which I can't say if it's true for the other flashcards and tools that are out there and some of the ones that we'll talk about in today's video, which I can't say to be true for a lot of the common flashcard tools, including the other one we'll talk about in this video being Quizlet. Now, obviously I'm biased because I used Anki throughout medical school and helped me get a 3.9 GPA. It's one of the main strategy strategies that I use and again, I go over that in that video so more reason to go ahead and check that out after you're done watching here. But there are some cons. And often when I work with students one-on-one through our coaching programs, I find a lot of the cons that people don't want to use it and a lot of them are okay. One, it's just, it can be difficult to use. It's not very attractive, first of all. And then two, if you are brand new to using Anki, this can be a very scary setup, especially when you're looking at things like settings, or clicking on options and looking at things like this, like what in the world does this mean? If you're new to Anki, a lot of this is scary. And if you just want to be somebody who just gets into your learning and not have the time to learn a new tool, that can definitely be a drawback. In addition to just not understanding how the settings work, if for some reason one of your settings was causing you to maybe not see enough flashcards, maybe you had 400 flashcards for an upcoming test for the last four weeks. Well, maybe your cards were just set to where you only see 300 in a day and you wanted to review all of them. You may not get to see all those 100 unless you knew to look for that setting. So again, a lot of Anki is through trial and error when you have issues that you're running into, trying to figure out what parts of the settings that are maybe messing up. And on a personal basis, there's been tons of instances where I thought I did all my flashcards just to go into the browse section and just make sure that I had seen everything, only to find out that there's like 200 that were still left there. So again, you have to be careful in making sure that the amount of flashcards that you see and you can confirm those in the browse section are actually the ones in the amounts that you've done. And the last two cons that I would add for Anki is one, the ability to sync. So Anki has something called Anki Web which essentially means that not only can you do your flashcards all on your desktop, which is how most of you can use it but also through their website. So if you create a login account which you'll do when you make and download Anki then it will sync just like your Spotify, your iTunes may sync to your device as well as your laptop. The problem is that sometimes the syncing is not as smooth. Sometimes you're just downloading for quite some time and you're not really sure why because you've only added 20 more flashcards but Anki for some reason has found more updates that they need to now upload to their Anki Web or take from Anki Web and upload into your own desktop. So sometimes you can get in the way of your studying especially if you're using multiple devices that all are adding or using or adjusting your Anki cards. In addition to Anki Web, sometimes being a little finicky. The other part that I am not a big fan of is that although the cards are open source, for example, this flashcard deck gives me 800 cards, I actually can't see them until I download and these files can actually be pretty large and if you upload them, you may not be able to see the actual status of the quality of the cards until you do a few of them. So sometimes that does require a little bit of trial and error where you download them and then go into your Anki and look to see, okay, are these cards something I actually care to use? Are they relevant for the class or the material I'm learning? And often I may have to go through two or three pre-made decks until I find one that's like, this is actually pretty good. But again, it doesn't give you a nice feasibility of looking at all of them, it just only shows me three here. And the final drawback, and this is very, very tiny, but I know a lot of you guys out there are iOS users and Apple users, is that if you wanted to download Anki onto your Android device, which I have, it's absolutely free. So you can sync devices, no issues. But if I wanted to transfer it to my iPad, which is what I use in medical school too, I'd have to pay 25 bucks. Again, it's 25 bucks for using an app that has all of your flashcards, all of your learning tools, pretty much a drop in the bucket compared to all the other things that we spend as students. But it is another cost, and I don't know for sure why. There is a cost for iOS apps, but it is out there, so something to consider. Now, in regards to the aspect of actually doing flashcards, again, Quizlet is just very nice to look at, the UI is very simple, and you can essentially move through your flashcards pretty easily, either moving and clicking on it, and it'll just do this nice little flippy action, which I actually really like, or using keyboard shortcuts. So for example, if I click space, then it'll flip it, if I go up or down, which makes sense, it'll also flip it. If I go up to right, it'll move to the next card. Now, how I like to using these flashcards is you can go into the options section, and if you only wanna see the definition, then you wanna quiz yourself on the front of the card and only see the answer at the back once you're ready, or if you just wanted to have things be flipped, so if you were learning a language where it was the word in definition, it wouldn't matter which one you saw first, you wanna make sure you master both, and so in that setting, both would work. But the way I use Quizlet in college that worked really well is I would go through the flashcards, and I would either press S, or go ahead and click this little star function, and then go through all of my flashcards. But if I was struggling with some of them, because it was just like a hard question, I couldn't nail it down, I would press the S function. And at the very end, after I've gone through all 58 cards and understood which ones I felt pretty good at, which ones I still need to come back on, then I would just click start. Now what happens is that now it's gonna go from the 58 to seven, these are the seven flashcards that gave me a tough time, and then once I feel like that flashcard is no longer an issue, I can just press S, move forward, and it's not gonna show it to me, or I don't have to necessarily go back to it if I didn't want to. I can just continue to do this, and then again, press the start function, and click okay if I wanted to. So again, a very nice easy way of using space repetition and focusing on your weaknesses using Quizlet without necessarily having it built in. In addition to other pro of Quizlet is that it uses gamification. So maybe you just don't learn through flashcards, but maybe you're learning a bunch of languages at one time. One thing you can do is something called their match function. So essentially, it will show you all the flashcards, both the friends in the back, so separate things, and you can essentially just pick it as a game, and almost something like we did back in elementary school. And you try to see if you can pair things together and they disappear. By the way, that one was complete luck. I had no idea I didn't make this flashcard deck. So it's a very nice way of learning. Again, if you're learning a language or processes and like OCam, and you wanted to talk about step one, step two, then maybe you can pair things together to make sure you really nail it down. The final pro, probably the biggest pro of Quizlet, is that you can actually look up different topics. Also, it's kind of a semi-open source. So for example, maybe I was struggling with physiology. And now it will show me different study sets that people have made. So this individual has made 276 flashcards in physiology. I want to do both anatomy. If I want to just do like the upper extremity of the arm, because that's where I was learning in the anatomy lab, I could find those very specifically. And then I can click on it, unlike Anki, and actually see the quality of the cards before I even choose to review them. So here I can actually see what kind of questions they're asking and saying, oh, actually, this is what I'm learning in my current class. This is actually going to be a very good deck to try to practice and master. And if you really like somebody's flashcard deck, you can actually click this plus sign and add it to your own deck, as long as it's the public shared deck of flashcards. Now there are tons of pros of using Quizlet, but there are also a few cons. One of them is that space repetition is not naturally built into their tool. I think Quizlet at one point tried it and is actually within one of their paid premium models, but that actually no longer exists to my knowledge. Maybe I'm wrong, correct me in the comments if so. Con number two is while most students will be able to get away with using the free version of Quizlet, they do have premium versions that allow you to have different things like access to your flashcards offline, as well as access to other people's flashcards. And the cost may vary by the time that this video comes out, so I will link down below the Quizlet pricing page, if you guys are interested in being able to compare their various plans. And then finally, con number three of Quizlet is that because there's so many features, sometimes students don't actually get into the main part of what they need to be doing, which is the flashcards. This happens with Anki too, where people are spending so much time making their flashcards, but at least they know the end goal is to do the flashcards. It's not to play the games or to just read the answers, but it's to actually do the flashcards. Quizlet sometimes makes that not necessarily the easy goal to identify, it's just another tab, and there are multiple functions that they have built in. So there's one big thing that I would change, I would just have a big button that says start studying. And then essentially it would start asking you the questions that you've spent so much time making. Now that we've broken both Anki and Quizlet down by pros and cons, I want to go through four categories and essentially talk about the winners of each of them. Category number one is going to be how easy it is to start learning, and category number two is going to be how user-friendly it is. Category number three is going to be the community aspect, and category number four is going to be the overall retention. Let's break down the winners in each of these. So in terms of the ease of just getting in there and starting the learning, again, I feel like Quizlet has so many features that sometimes you don't actually start doing the flashcards, which is the whole point in the first place. So in that case, Anki is simply make the flashcards to the flashcards. Even if it takes you forever to make them, at least you're getting to the part of doing them. That's why Anki gets my vote in that section. Category number two is how user-friendly it is. This is pretty simple as you kind of looked at how both of them looked. Anki has lots of settings and a lot of things that scare people from using it the first time, and it can get easily more complicated as there's so many people that are out there that are Anki experts that make the process a lot more complicated. Quizlet, pretty simple. Make the flashcards to do them, you see everything in one place. So again, the winner here goes to Quizlet. Category number three is the community aspect. This means how easy it is to get resources from other people, how easy it is to evaluate the quality of the resources from other people and then include them and add them into your own study resources. Here, it's actually pretty close. Anki has tons and tons of resources and pre-made cards that people are using that are very popular, particularly in medical school. And Quizlet has tons of resources, but I wouldn't say that Quizlet has, these are the flashcard decks that somebody has made in Quizlet you definitely need to go check out. I don't think the popularity is quite there, but overall I think Quizlet makes it easier to evaluate the quality of the flashcard deck before you download a big gigabyte plus file, which for me is going to be the biggest leading factor why I think Quizlet is gonna be the best for community impact. And so for me, that's why I give Quizlet the slide edge and the community aspect of it. And then finally, overall retention. Now for me, hands down, this is a very easy answer to go to Anki because when you're using space repetition versus a tool that doesn't have it built in, the space repetition tool wins every single time, which is why I recommend at least giving Anki a shot if you're still nervous or if you tried in the past or weren't really comfortable. And again, that video down below has been watched over by almost half a million people on YouTube thus far and people have loved it. So just go ahead and check it out. You don't want it to feel committed to using Anki but at least start to see the pros and cons as well as those advanced features that I used. And in that video, I also go over those advanced strategies that really just changed the game for me on how quickly I was studying but still having high levels of retention. So again, both Anki and Quizlet are both amazing tools. Use them based off of the pros and cons that attract you the most. Don't feel like you have to just use Anki just because everyone else in medical school or on their journey is using it. Find the one that works for you. Feel free to mess around with both of them. And it's easy enough to actually transition your Quizlet flashcards using some free add-ons and websites and then making them into Anki. So you can always kind of revert back and forth if you really need it to. Now, if you made it this far in the video that means that not only do you care about the tools that you use and make sure that you're using the best ones for you, you also care about the grades you're getting. And so if you're not getting the grades you want or if you're just studying way too long to actually get those grades, make sure you check out some of those links down below in the description. Some are free, some of our pay programs. The one I'd recommend is checking out just what kind of results you can get. If you worked with myself and my team, one-on-one to help you create a personalized study strategy. I promise if you click that link, the results the students are getting is just mind-blowing over the span of just a few days of working with us. So again, if you're interested, that would be linked down below. But if you just want to learn more about the study strategies that really just changed the game for me on my medical journey, at the very least if you're interested in just learning how to get better grades on your journey then make sure again that Anki video is huge. There's a reason it's the most popular that we have here on the channel. Make sure you check it out if you haven't. As well as this video right here on the most popular study strategies that I use to get a 3.9 GPA medical school, step by step. Hopefully you guys enjoy these. As always, my friends, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was a little help to you guys and yours. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.